Prensa. voanews.com
An emergency
vaccination campaign is getting under way in northeastern Nigeria to prevent a
deadly cholera outbreak from spreading to other countries. The World Health
Organization reports the potentially devastating cholera situation is emerging
in Borno State in northeastern Nigeria. During the past few months, it says
2,600 suspected cases of this fatal disease, including 48 deaths, have occurred
in this former stronghold of Boko Haram. The militant group has been waging war
to establish an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria.
Dominique Legros
is cholera coordinator for WHO’s department for pandemic and epidemic diseases.
He says the outbreak, which is centered in camps for internally displaced
people, is spreading to other areas of northeastern Nigeria, toward Chad and
northern Cameroon. He says 900,000 people in the state will receive the oral
cholera vaccine to quickly contain the spread of the disease.
“Once it is out
of the box, once it has spread, it is very, very difficult to contain and we
have a huge number of cases and deaths," he said. "So, this outbreak
in Nigeria, hopefully, will not reach Chad, because in Chad already, we have an
alert in the eastern part of the country towards the border with Sudan, 344
cases, 49 deaths.”
Legros says this
comes to a 14 percent case fatality. He notes this is very high for a cholera
outbreak, which usually has a case fatality rate of less than one percent. WHO
estimates the global cholera disease burden at around 2.9 million suspected
cases, including 95,000 deaths. It reports Yemen has the world's worst cholera
epidemic, with nearly 690,000 suspected cases and more than 2,000 deaths.
The agency
expresses concern about the situation in Africa, where it reports tens of
thousands of suspected cases and thousands of deaths in, among others; Somalia,
South Sudan, Sudan, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Tanzania.